Cast:

When the trailer to this movie first dropped I was actually rather excited to watch it. I like a good creature feature/monster movie but for some reason this just dropped off my radar after that.

I must say this movie starts out fast, no getting to know characters or even set up some sort of character arch. We get to see two couples run in the woods being chased by something off camera and one of them dies. This is the first five minutes of the film. After that we do get the traditional set up but the hook was already there.

The cast… This is a mixed bag because in the first six minutes I already hated one of the characters. We have the brother and sister and who they were dating and the fifth wheel which was the guy I couldn’t stand. While they were hiking in the wood they come across the “Animal” and the movie goes from there. They get trapped in a house and will get picked off as the film goes. What I like about the plot of the movie is that only a few people seem to understand that they were herded into the house for some reason.

So the one really famous actor is Joey Lauren Adams and wow does she suck in this. Nothing that she does in this movie is believable at all, her line delivery was so wooden it was like something that belonged in a SyFy original. I find it really sad that some of these actors and actresses that I have never heard of does a better job when she is the top billed on IMDB. Keke Palmer, Elizabeth Gillies and even the guy who annoyed me (Paul Iacono) was good.

So when I first saw the beast I thought of the film Feast which is a good thing. One thing they did right was in the first third of the movie the only thing we got was a head shape. You couldn’t even tell if it was a quadruped of a bipedal creature… all you know that is was fast and vicious with what seemed like black skin. At one point I got the idea that it may be somewhat rodent like, I really was lost as to what the whole thing looked like. It wasn’t until the later third of the movie that it really shown the beast off and it was really well designed.

When the beast actually gets them I really don’t see a whole lot of it eating someone, it just mauls them. We get some severed limbs in the beginning but the first kill it was punching and ripping at the body. The blood splatters were really good, with the limited light it looked believable and the prosthetic body parts in the beginning blended into the background enough to be plausible.

It was a good film but I also can understand why it was forgotten by so many people so quickly. It was a decent movie but it really brought nothing to the table we haven’t seen before, Feast for example had a very similar plot of a beast terrorizing people trapped in a building, which is similar to Jaws (people being trapped on a boat). The issue is that it didn’t bring anything new to the table. The only thing to say about the end was that it had one. There wasn’t much of a surprise to me who survived but the last second of the film was something that was a little too obvious.